For the past year, the San Francisco socialite has been fending off those who would like to see her forced out of the museums she has lavished with her time and money for two decades. That, at least, is how Ms. Wilsey, 72, describes the recent turmoil.

During lunch at her Napa Valley estate, a white Maltese sat on her lap, sniffing a plate of sliced peaches and cantaloupe. “You can’t beat me,” Ms. Wilsey said, stroking the dog, Dazzle. The top of its head was stained pink from her lipstick kisses. “You will see me prevail. That’s what you will see.”

On this pleasant late-summer afternoon, Ms. Wilsey, who wore a wrap of oyster-size pearls around her neck, was still wondering about those press reports in July holding that she had resigned her post as president of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which oversees her favored de Young, as well as the Legion of Honor museum. The story of her resignation was simply not true, she said, and she had a recording of a June board meeting on her iPhone to prove it.

Her coal eyes flashed when she was asked to identify the anonymous wag who had told a reporter her run had come to an end. “I have no idea, and I’d like to kill them,” Ms. Wilsey said. No one was going to run her out, she added. She would remain, overseeing politics and fund-raising. And to her detractors she would like to say: “You will look like a bunch of idiots. And I am going to laugh myself silly.”

Deep Connections

San Francisco has long had its share of society scandals to titillate everyone from the bohos of Haight-Ashbury to the swells on Nob Hill. People here still recall when the oil scion Gordon Getty revealed in 1999 that he had a second family in Los Angeles while married to his wife, Ann. But nothing in the recent past has captivated the city’s gossips more than the travails of Diane Wilsey, known as Dede, a daughter of privilege who moved to San Francisco in 1965 and made a name for herself as one of the city’s most prominent fund-raisers.

Her name is on the Diane B. Wilsey Center for the Opera. She raised funds to restore Grace Cathedral, one of the city’s fabled landmarks, and a Catholic girls school in the Mission District. But Ms. Wilsey is best known for her patronage of the de Young in Golden Gate Park. Many people credit her with saving it after the original 1919 structure was damaged in the 1989 earthquake. She led the campaign to raise $208 million to build a new one, donating $10 million herself and sweet-talking or strong-arming the balance through her deep connections to Northern California’s aristocrats.

But friends and others who acknowledge her charitable works say she can be dismissive of less prominent peers, especially those who clash with her. Her stepson, Sean Wilsey, cast her as a ruthless gold digger in his acclaimed 2005 memoir, “Oh, the Glory of It All.”

“She can laugh and joke with anyone, even a truck driver,” said Harry Parker, the Fine Arts Museums’ director from 1987 to 2005. “Her failing is that she has not always listened to what people told her if they didn’t have social standing.”

In the end, Ms. Wilsey believes, her critics will be silenced. With the millions of dollars she has given to San Francisco institutions, she believes she should be praised, not pilloried.

“I personally feel they should be erecting a statue to me,” she said.

Closing Ranks

“I know you are in town, and I know why you are calling,” said the husky voice on the other end of the telephone. “But I don’t talk about my friends.”

Speaking was Denise Hale, one of the city’s grande dames, whose late husband earned a fortune running department stores. San Francisco society is dominated by wealthy families who settled there generations earlier. They include the Bechtels (who made their money in construction), the Hellmans (finance), the Gettys (oil), the Fishers (retail) and the Wilseys (real estate).

The people who are part of this small, exclusive world close ranks when a scandal breaks. “I think people are loath to criticize society people because of the money,” said Lois Lehrman, who owned the society magazine Nob Hill Gazette for three decades.

A number of philanthropists refused to be interviewed for this article, including Vanessa Getty, a socialite and museum trustee with Ms. Wilsey, and the heiress Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, San Francisco’s chief of protocol.

Image

Ms. Wilsey, far left, at the opening night of the San Francisco Opera in 2011.CreditLaura Morton

“Don’t underestimate the people who serve on boards,” said Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco. “They are shrewd. It is no different than the world of politics.”

And politics is something Ms. Wilsey understands all too well. She was born in Washington, D.C., in 1944, the second of three children of Wiley T. Buchanan Jr., the chief of protocol under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Her father also served as ambassador to Luxembourg and Austria. Ms. Wilsey’s mother, Ruth, 98, is an heir to the Dow Chemical fortune. As a girl, Ms. Wilsey accompanied her parents to Europe, where they dined with royal families and heads of state. She summered at the family’s estate, once owned by the Vanderbilts, in Newport, R.I.

“I sort of always had social standing because my parents did,” she said.

At her Napa Valley estate, Dazzle frolicked on the grass with another Maltese, Twinkle. A fountain gurgled. The outdoor table was set with pink monogrammed linens framed by nosegays of fragrant pink roses. To Ms. Wilsey’s left was a brass bell. She rang it when she wanted the cook’s attention.

Picking at a skewer of grilled chicken, she said she was overweight as a child and vowed never to be fat again. “I’m a middle child,” she said. “I was also the one nobody listened to.” That caused tension, she said, with her older sister, Bonnie, whom she looked up to. “My father would say: ‘This is my pretty daughter, Bonnie. And this is my smart daughter, Dede.’ Do you think I wanted to be ‘smart’? I just wanted to be dumb and pretty. I just wanted once to have him say, ‘This is my dumb, pretty daughter, Dede.’”

Beauty, though, is relative. Ms. Wilsey was on the cover of Town & Country in June 1962, her svelte figure wrapped in yards of fabric and white lace. She was a debutante, and her father wrote in the magazine about her coming out. At 1 a.m., the guests gathered at “Dede’s Peppermint Lounge,” a custom-made dance club designed by Valerian Rybar, a prominent interior decorator at the time. The Bo Diddley Trio played that night; guests did the step that was all the rage at the time, the twist.

Three years later, she married John Traina Jr., a shipping executive from San Francisco, “despite her parents’ objections,” according to press reports at the time. Across 15 years of marriage, they had two sons, Trevor and Todd. After the divorce was final, she married Al Wilsey, a real estate magnate and former husband of a good friend, Pat Montandon, then a society columnist in San Francisco.

By all accounts, Ms. Wilsey found a forgiving patriarch in her second husband. He would whisk her off by helicopter to Mendocino, Calif., for picnics. He didn’t mind her razor-sharp tongue. “Never feel guilty for anything you ever did to me,” she said he told her once, “because you make these snarky comments once in awhile.” And every Christmas, they kicked off the social season with a party at their Pacific Heights mansion for about 300 of San Francisco’s elite.

Mr. Brown, the former mayor, was a regular. “It was mandatory,” he said. “If you ever get an invitation, you have to go. If you don’t get invited, that is even worse.”

Guests in tuxedos and Oscar de la Renta gowns gathered in a receiving line to pay their respects to the Wilseys. The guest list for the event functioned as an annual measure of social status. “She was very definitive about who was on the list,” Mr. Parker said. “It was her statement about who really mattered.”

Ms. Wilsey has continued to hold the party more than a decade after Mr. Wilsey’s death. But such soirees are more than an opportunity to mingle with society friends; they also provide her with a setting where she can shake down her connected friends for money to benefit the institutions she treasures.

“Mom and I were dancing at a formal event,” said her son Trevor, a technology entrepreneur, “and she said, ‘Dance me over to that man over there.’ She reached over to the person and said to me, ‘He is going to give me $1 million for our museum.’ The man said, ‘I am?’”

A month later, she got a $1 million check from the man in question.

Ms. Wilsey’s living room tables in Rutherford are cluttered with photos of her sons, their families, her parents and her two former husbands. When asked who her good friends were, she named Todd and Trevor. “My husbands,” she added. “They were my best friends.” Mr. Traina’s ashes are stored in a wooden box near the hearth. “My sons said he liked people and belonged in the living room,” she said. Mr. Wilsey’s ashes are in a stone urn in a private garden visible through a picture window.

Ms. Wilsey has a number of close acquaintances. “I’m very circumspect about friends,” she said. “It is very hard to trust people here. You just don’t know what their motive is.”

Absent from the family photos is Sean Wilsey, the stepson who, in a scathing memoir, characterized her as a vapid socialite who married his father for his $300 million fortune. Mr. Wilsey declined to comment for this article. Dinnertime conversations, he wrote, included such topics as the “endearing unintelligence” of tiny dogs, debutante parties and the popularity of his stepbrothers.

“I actually had a good relationship with Sean, and I have no idea why he decided to write that idiotic book,” Ms. Wilsey said.

Image

Ms. Wilsey at her home in Rutherford, Calif.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

Now, Ms. Wilsey indulges her three grandchildren. She built for them a small village a short walk from the main house. It includes a carousel, three squat miniature air-conditioned houses, a general store and a mock train station. Ms. Wilsey decorated the pale yellow walls inside the little station with murals of her dogs, her grandchildren and a monkey wearing a pink tutu.

A Compromise

Ms. Wilsey estimated that she has donated to more than 380 charities in the past year, among them the Humane Society Silicon Valley, which named the Sparkle Wilsey Grooming Center in honor of a deceased dog. “It is something I like,” she said. She declined to say how much money she donates each year. But the institution that Ms. Wilsey is most focused on is the de Young, which has been dubbed by some the “DeDe Young.”

She was elected board president in 1998 and named chief executive of the Fine Arts Museums in 2011. The chief executive title fell to her after John Buchanan, the former museum director who brought a populist sensibility to the de Young, told her he had cancer and was going to die. During his tenure, he ran the museum while she raised the funds to attract the traveling blockbuster exhibits celebrating King Tut and Yves Saint Laurent.

But while Ms. Wilsey is applauded for her ability to bring in coin, she is less exalted for her managerial skill absent a strong partner like Mr. Parker, Mr. Buchanan or the newly appointed director, Max Hollein, an art historian and museum administrator from Vienna who was hired in March.

“A lowly staff member does not command her attention,” Mr. Parker said. “There is a master-servant relationship that gets in the way of things.”

Ms. Wilsey denied the characterization. Still, several curators and others have bristled under her leadership. Robert Flynn Johnson, the museum’s curator emeritus, said he and other curators were asked to wear suits and ties to a gala dinner for the opening of the new de Young in 2005. When he arrived, though, he said, he found that he wasn’t invited for the dinner portion of the evening, only for cocktails.

He was irked, too, when Ms. Wilsey paid $1,000 apiece to have the names of her dogs posted on a donor wall meant for patrons unable to lay out huge sums. “Some people had to save $100 a month,” Mr. Johnson said. “It was a sacrifice. My parents’ names are on that wall. She has a whole court named after her.”

Ms. Wilsey’s woes began in earnest in 2014, when she approved that a check be cut from the museum’s coffer to pay a retired city lighting engineer, Bill Huggins, who had worked at the museum and was ailing. Ms. Wilsey was friendly with Therese Chen, Mr. Huggins’s wife and a de Young employee. Ms. Wilsey said she did not initiate the payment, nor did she need board approval for it. She said she could not discuss the amount of the check, but press reports put it at roughly $450,000. It was co-signed by Michelle Gutierrez, the museum’s chief financial officer at the time. In 2015, though, Ms. Gutierrez filed a complaint with the city and the state attorney general’s office, saying the payment was improper. After doing so, she was dismissed.

Ms. Gutierrez, Ms. Wilsey and others involved are not allowed to discuss the situation as part of a settlement agreement. But according to press reports, when trustees involved in the Fine Arts Museums’ organization learned about the payment last year, they expressed concern that it was made without the board’s knowledge or approval.

Bernard Osher, a friend of Ms. Wilsey’s who attends her annual Christmas party, resigned from the board. (He did not return a call seeking comment.) According to Mr. Parker, Mr. Osher “thought the action was outrageous and couldn’t support it.” More recently, Louise Renne, San Francisco’s former city attorney, was one of two other trustees to resign, saying she could not “fulfill her fiduciary duty,” given the board’s management.

“The old guard can’t stay around forever, and it shouldn’t,” Ms. Renne said.

In July, the museum settled with Ms. Gutierrez for $2 million to avoid a potential wrongful-termination lawsuit. The money given to Mr. Huggins was repaid to the museum by unnamed donors. (Ms. Wilsey declined to say if she was one of them.)

Ms. Wilsey said she expects her detractors to be surprised when they find out that she is not leaving. But in a new arrangement, she said, she will share more management responsibility with six other trustees, a move she has been advocating for months.

While accepting the change, Ms. Wilsey said: “There is no way if I were a man I would be the victim. A man who gives as much money as I do?”

As lunch wound down, she recalled a time when her granddaughter, Daisy, hit her head on a glass table at the age of 2.

“I heard this horrible crash,” Ms. Wilsey said, “and she came out from under the table with this big bang on the head. And I said to her: ‘Daisy, this is not going to be the last time you hit your head on a glass ceiling. But you did the right thing. Never cry. Never show that it hurts. That’s the most important thing you can learn from hitting your head today.’”